Myopia: How Counter-Terrorism Has Blinded Our Intelligence Community

By Joshua Foust

The United States' overriding interest in "actionable" information on terrorists has produced a dangerous form of tunnel vision.

Men step on a U.S flag during an anti-American rally organized by Shabab-e-Milli, the youth wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, in Peshawar, on April 13th, 2012. (Fayaz Aziz/Reuters)

In the last 24 months, unpredictable events have caught U.S.
policymakers by surprise: the "Arab Spring" movement in 2011 and the September
11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. In the wake of both
surprises, many in Congress and the public have been wondering: why didn't we
see this coming?

Over the last decade of counterterrorism operations, the
U.S. intelligence community (IC) has undergone a remarkable transformation. A
relatively modest part of the national security community before the 9/11
attacks, by 2010 the IC had swelled to encompass nearly a million people largely
focused on prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global
counterterrorism mission.

In their landmark 2010 series, the Washington Post reported
that the IC "has become so large, so unwieldy, and so secretive that no one
knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs
exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

While the sheer size of the IC is staggering -- the 2013
budget for intelligence activities tops $75
billion -- its mission is also of serious concern. Large areas of the IC
have move away from their traditional role of analyzing a broad range of
current events for policymakers and toward supporting the global
counterterrorism mission. News stories about this shift suggest
the counterterrorism mission has become the overarching concern of the national
security staff.

This shift in focus can create blind spots that pose unique
challenges for the president. If branch chiefs and the policymakers they
support value "exploitable" information over deep understanding, they might be
ignoring potentially vital information that doesn't seem immediately of
interest.

Imagine an analyst finding reports of a growing discontent
in a Middle Eastern country's politics; if that does not provide immediate
benefit for a decision-making process for targeting suspected terrorists, it
can easily be ignored in the avalanche of targeting information.

Before his sudden resignation this past week, CIA Director
David Petraeus was widely rumored to be spending much of his time micromanaging
the CIA's expanded paramilitary operations -- poring over drone target lists
and pushing for more kinetic action. Right before his sudden departure from the
agency, Petraeus had requested a dramatic
expansion of its armed drone fleet. It's safe to assume this wasn't to get
better analysis out of Langley.

One reason for the IC's shift is that counterterrorism
intelligence is relatively easy to collect: much of it can be acquired
remotely, through forensic financial investigation and sophisticated
surveillance. Moreover, the analysis of this data also lends itself to
technologically advanced analysis -- the so-called "gonkulators" that ingest
enormous amounts of data and automatically
generate conclusions and targets of interest.

The rapid adoption of complicated technological systems
happened at the same time as the shift toward the expanded counterterrorism
mission. Lost in the shuffle was an equal focus on
human intelligence (HUMINT) and local expertise. Though vital to some missions,
like the covert
drone war in Pakistan, even HUMINT has been limited by the focus on
immediately exploitable information while deeper understanding of countries and
conflict zones has atrophied.

But expertise is more than just collecting interviews with
local people (a central tenet of HUMINT). As the scholar Manan Ahmed, a historian
of Pakistan at Freie Universitat Berlin noted,
"There are [...] satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover
for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet
who can decipher this data?"

Developing the specific knowledge to understand why and how
certain pieces of information matter -- not just to a narrow counterterrorism
mission but the full range of U.S. security -- is difficult and time consuming.
Few in the intelligence community have it, and sometimes policymakers have
mistakenly relied on outsiders to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with embarrassing results.

President Obama can reverse this trend. He needs to bring
the IC back to its roots. The counterterrorism mission can and should continue,
but it should be placed in the context of the IC's traditional focus on the
long term prospects of regions and countries of concern. By fusing deep local
knowledge with the vast technological capabilities built over the last decade,
the IC can generate the knowledge it needs to inform the President about how to
make smart decisions that secure America's interests for the long term.

The IC can go back to the basics by prioritizing the kind of
information it wants: by focusing less on the daily grind of counterterrorism
missions and more on the social, political, and economic currents that are
driving change across the Middle East and around the world. By developing a more holistic picture of the
foreign policy challenges facing the country in the next four years, smart
choices can fill in the knowledge gaps and make future surprises less likely.